At our new home, we have learned about the power of water to carry soil downhill. We cleared about an acre and a half of land at the house site. It was covered with the scrubby pines of an overgrown pasture that hadn’t seen a cow in fifty years, and we decided to put the house there in part to avoid damaging the hardwoods covering much of the remaining 28 acres that were certainly standing when Sherman’s men burned Columbia during the Civil War.
I needed a spot for the garden and for the chickens, and so a nice man with a bulldozer happily obliged my desires for destruction. What we didn’t realize while trees were falling was the enormity of the task we had undertaken to transform the bare dirt into soil.
You would think I would know better by now. Well, I did know better, but somehow I thought we could make the soil stay on the hill long enough to sprout some grass seeds and hold back the soil.
In May, scorching 100-degree-days were still a bit of a memory. And I expected that the well at the new house would be as good as the one at the old house that happily provided an endless supply of water, even though we never wasted it there.
One-hundred-degree days arrived about the same time the men laid the sod. We realized, after fifteen pallets of sod were on the ground, that our well, as initially drilled, would not support an irrigation system. The reservoir held about 40 minutes of water, which meant that if we watered the grass we no longer had drinking water in the house until more water filled the reservoir.
I conserve water and do not run the sprinkler system unless absolutely necessary, but keeping sod alive in June made watering it necessary. We solved the well troubles, and then rain began to fall in torrents, in amounts of several inches a week. The sod has thrived, but sowing grass seed was impossible.
Unfortunately, because of the well troubles, we didn’t even bother trying to sow grass seed. The torrents of rain washed much of the remaining top soil into the woods. This winter, we intend to have the soil scraped back up the hill and plan to sow seeds on it. We will also probably build a retaining wall or two and will plant some shrubs as a windbreak.
My garden spot is doing well; it’s on a flat piece of ground. We robbed soil from that area to build up the ground to level the pool, and we purchased topsoil (unscreened and weedy though it was) to fill in the hole that remained. A local horse farm will load all the manure you can use for a small fee, so I got about four pickup truck loads of manure and put it on the garden spot, had the landscaper haul some of the granite dust left over from drilling the well 500 feet into stone onto the site, added about 100 pounds of lime, 100 pounds of cottonseed meal, and had the landscaper till it in with his tractor.
The squash is the first crop harvested from this land since the last cows left fifty or more years ago. I am told that a portion of our land, an overgrown field not yet returned to forest, but well on its way to reforestation covered as it was by cedar trees, sweet gums, and other weedy trees, produced some row crops and hay for some years into this century, but had been given over to scrubby trees for over a decade. We cleared it and are keeping it mowed to prevent reforestation.
As for the rest of the property we have cleared, we have the expected sod and bushes around the house and my flower garden in the front of the house. From my many years of experience in gardening, and to the tolerant consternation of the landscapers and building contractor, I knew exactly what I wanted in landscaping, and, possibly more important: what I did NOT want.
Deer tolerant plants (although I haven’t seen a deer, thanks to the coyotes), shrubs that are the correct size for the space so they do not require anything more than a shaping-up once a year, and a manageable flower garden will enable me to enjoy a beautiful, and an easy-to-maintain, landscape. 
I am restraining myself to avoid creating the beautiful, although impossible for me to take care of anymore, garden of my previous home. At that home, I set out to grow every plant I had ever wanted to grow, and I succeeded in doing so as long as it could survive our climate and the critters. Now I am growing the things I love that will be happy without too much trouble.
The fall has arrived, and I have begun attempting to sow seed in these barren places. When we are able, we will have another nice man with heavy equipment move some of the soil back up the hill and we will sow more seed to hold back the erosion.
This week, I have dug some terraces in the vegetable garden and across the chicken yard to retard washing. As I write this, thunder crashes and I hear rain pounding the metal roof, and I envision those seeds I sowed earlier flowing into the woods, despite my efforts of straw and terraces and attempts at soil preparation.
